So my brother wrote this and honestly? I thought I was the good writer of the family qq
Jolene awoke abruptly. She laid motionless in her bed, sepulchred under the warmth and safety of her heavy comforter. Tucked away secure and yet still she felt naked and exposed, like a nail sticking out of the wood. “What woke me up?” she thought to herself while continuing her mummy like pose, eyes still closed. Something felt wrong, she didn’t understand why her body felt like it was naturally in a defensive state right now, like she was being stalked.
Then it began. A pounding so deep in her chest it couldn’t possibly be her heart. It emanated from her very core, reverberating along the inside walls of her body. These two sensations whirled within her chest like a tornado as they climbed up her esophagus to the base of her throat. It roared up through her mouth, slamming into the back of her teeth like a battering ram as they remained shut clenched tight. Jolene realized she was trying to scream. But she couldn’t. She still hasn’t moved once since she woke up. Was it that she didn’t move yet, or that she couldn’t? Was she really trying to scream, or was it uninvited like her sudden paralysis? At this point her own thoughts felt foreign. They tasted like the thoughts of someone different, the thoughts of a familiar stranger.
As if on cue her eyes snapped open and her body jolted upright into a sitting position with perfect posture, this being the weirdest thing so far, thought her naturally slouchy self. The room, normally pitch black this time of night, was dimly lit. There was a glow coming from the staircase, bright enough to see Orlando Bloom’s worn, overwashed pirate face on her blanket and the pile of empty photo albums on her desk. Without any warning she found herself up and out of bed, walking towards the flickering light. After rounding the corner she could see candles lining both sides of the upstairs hallway, forming a path.
Parts of her were terrified and confused while the other part felt driven to blindly follow this makeshift promenade. By the time she sauntered through the archaic walkway and arrived downstairs she was starting to become more aware of her situation but had less control of her actions. She was all alone, but there were people here. Dark figures standing off to the sides of rooms and in the corners, shifting back and forth. They were whispering, all whispering different words in different tones but they remained in sync with one another. The walls were whistling as they seemed to breathe. In and then out. In and then out. The faint sound of fingernails scurrying across the drop ceiling tiles were distracting her from the cold wet floor she dragged herself across. Around another corner and through the kitchen, she was getting closer to the back door. She continued few more steps forward, but then there was a sharp, unexpected left turn that began her descent into the basement, her feet still following that old familiar pattern of skipping the creakiest steps.
The basement had been emptied. Somehow between the time she had fallen asleep and now someone had managed to empty her entire basement, a basement that had been filled floor to ceiling of old junk and storage from over three generations of her family. Even the back room full of unopened toys had seemingly been emptied. Now all that remained was the candled path and a circle, which was constructed of more candles and nine, old, victorian mirrors. She made her way to the center of this reflective ring.
Symbols were scribbled on the floor that spiraled out from the middle of the circle like branches of a dead tree. She looked up to the reflections, was she naked this whole time? “Did I go to sleep like this?” she asked out loud, the first time she’s heard her own voice since she woke up. She started to spin, and that’s when they all began to appear. All of the people she has ever held dear and lost had started to show in these mirrors. But this was a not a warm or welcoming reunion. They too were naked. They were ragged and rotting. Her late loved ones looked sinister, decayed in such a way it was indescribable. Like teeth that needed to be pulled, they began to turn black and were pitted with holes.
One by one, with their jaundice complexion they reached through their respective mirror and pulled on Jolene. One by one they took their turns and retreated to their mirrors, each with their piece of her. They took her memories of each of them, and in turn, her love. Everything that made her who she was, all of the people she had ever loved, and with that, all of her most important lessons, erased from the world. By the time that ninth, little hand retreated to the other side, Jolene was merely a husk. That was the one loss she had always wished she could truly forget. The one she tried to erase from her thoughts. This one she thought losing the memory of would make her stronger. But this was the one she could not live without. Because even with all of the pain that it brought her, he was always her source of strength. This was the one that emptied her the most. This was the hammer on the nail. After this, she became nothing more than an empty vessel.
